President Donald Trump's second administration has targeted government spending in various forms. One example is federal funding for medical research: Trump has cut at least $1.8 billion in funding for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to an analysis published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and his annual budget proposal would cut NIH funding even further.
On its own, this scenario is not as alarming as some may say. Private companies spend more on medical research per year than the federal government. But this week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a shot at private funders as well—raising the question: Who does the administration think should fund medical research?
"NIH has $46 billion that it allocates to science every year," Kennedy said on an episode of the podcast The Ultimate Human. "Unfortunately, that system has been corrupted through a number of different vectors, so the people who get the money tend to be people who have been approved by the industry."
